Category Robotics Classification

General Motors announced this week that they would “take full responsibility” if a crash takes place during an autonomous driving trip. This follows a pledge to do the same made some time ago by Daimler, Google and Volvo and possibly others.

What’s interesting is that they don’t add the caveat “if the system is at fault.” Of course, if the system is not at fault, they can get payment from the other driver, and so it’s still OK to tell the passenger or owner that GM takes responsibility.

GM is moving on a rapid timetable with the technology they bought with Cruise not too long ago. In fact, rumours of a sooner than expected release actually shot their stock up a bit this week.

Even to this day I still see articles which ask the question, “who is liable in an accident?” and then don’t answer it as though the answer is unknown or hard to figure out. It never was. There was never any doubt that the creators of these vehicles would take responsibility for any accidents they cause. Even if they tried not to, the liability would fall to them in the court system. People have been slow to say it because lawyers always advise clients, “never say in advance that you will take liability for something!” Generally good advice, but pointless here, and the message of responsibility makes customers feel better. Would you get into a taxi if you knew you would be liable if the driver crashed?

Senate bill

In other news this week, a Senate panel passed its own version of the House bill deregulating robocars. Notable was the exclusion of trucks, at the request of the Teamsters. I have predicted since this all began that the Teamsters would eventually bring their influence to bear on automated trucking. They will slow things down, but it’s a battle they won’t win. Truck accidents kill 4,000 people every year, and truck driving is a grueling boring profession whose annual turnover sometimes exceeds 100%. At that rate, if they introduced all-automated truck fleets today, it would be a very long time before somebody who actually wanted a trucking job lost it to automation. Indeed, even in the mostly automated world there will still be routes and tasked best served by humans, and they will be served by those humans who want it.

Actually, this new-world trucking will be a much nicer job. It will be safer, and nobody will drive the long-haul cross-country routes that grind you with boredom, take you away from your home and family for a week or more while you eat bad food and sleep in cheap motels or the back of your rig.

Uber

Speaking of trucking, while I have not been commenting much on the Waymo/Uber lawsuit because of my inside knowledge, and the personalities don’t bear too much on the future of the technology, it certainly has been getting fast and furious.

You can read the due diligence report Uber had prepared before buying Otto, and a Wired article which starts with a silly headline but has some real information as well.

Other items

Luminar, the young 1.5 micron LIDAR startup, has announced that Toyota will use their LIDARs.

Lyft has added Ford, along with Google to its partner list. Since Lyft did a $500M investment deal with GM, it’s clear they don’t want to stick with just one player, even for that sum. Google may have larger sums — it does seem clear that the once happy partnership of Uber and Google is over.

Baidu announced a 10 billion Yuan investment fund for self-driving startups.

Rumours suggest Waymo may expand their Phoenix pilot to a real self-driving taxi service for the public sooner than expected.

This is the angle between the longitudinal axis of the aircraft and the horizontal axis, when the drone flies inclined. For example, when the drone flies in perfectly horizontal position, the bank angle is zero. When it starts to turn its axis the bank angle starts to increase. When flying straight, planes bank angle is zero and when making left or right turns, they have a greater than zero bank angle.

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Ada Lovelace Day on October 10 2017 is a day to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and there was no shortage of women to feature on Robohub’s annual Ada Lovelace Day “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list. (If you don’t see someone you expected then they’ll probably be on next year’s list, or on our first four lists from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 – please read them too!)

This year we are featuring women from all over the world, including early stage entrepreneurs, seasoned business women, investors, inventors, makers, educators, and organizers; we also feature early career researchers, established academics, senior scientists and politicians. The unifying characteristic of all these women is their inspirational story, their enthusiasm, their fearlessness, their vision, ambition, and accomplishments. Every year we’re inspired and hope that you are too.

It’s been a roller coaster year of tough headlines for tech diversity … In February, engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber. For some it was a wake-up call to the sexual harassment in tech culture, and for others it was just a public confirmation of what was already well-known. A series of high-profile mea culpa’s from male investors and CEOs ensued; then James Damore was fired from Google after implying that biological differences — not sexism — lie behind the gender gap.

It seems negative, but the publicity around bias, harassment and lack of diversity does provide public vindication for women like Susan Fowler, Tracy Chou, Erica Joy Baker and Ellen Pao who took stands against sexism and suffered for it. We’re now starting to see some positive outcomes. For example, Ellen Pao has just released a book, Reset, about her experience suing a prominent venture capital firm for bias and says, “My lawsuit failed. Others won’t.”

This year, Ellen Pao, Tracy Chou, Erica Joy Baker joined other women fighting against sexism and racism in the tech industry by starting Project Include, a non-profit that uses data and advocacy to accelerate diversity and inclusion solutions in the tech industry. Tracy Chou was also named as one of MIT Tech review’s Innovators under 35 alongside some 25 Women in Robotics alumni – Angela Schoellig [2013] and Anca Draga [2016].

Women in robotics still face challenges, even danger, such as Stella Uzochukwu-Denis and her fearless female robotics students face from Boko Haram extremists. And we all face the relentless lack of diversity and general apathy about the gender gap in our daily workplaces.

And yet robotics itself faces huge challenges. We are a very small segment of the very rich tech industry and robotics startups struggle to attract great talent. We have an opportunity to improve our diversity hiring practices to gain more recruits as well as increasing our internal innovation capacity, something that Linda Pouliot of Dishcraft writes about with elegance. As Pouliot notes, if you’re a robotics startup looking to hire, your personal network is your biggest asset — yet another reason for women in robotics to know about each other and to network, like with the Women in Robotics organization.

Speaking of networks, we’re biased towards the countries and careers that we know well. It’s a challenge to provide a representative sample of the wide range of jobs around the world that women are doing in robotics. Perhaps you can help us for next time with more nominations from other regions? Email nominations@womeninrobotics.org with suggestions.

Without further ado, here are 25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order) for 2017. Enjoy!

Muyinatu Bell Assistant Professor at Johns HopkinsMuyinatu A. Lediju Bell is the director of the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Systems Engineering (PULSE) Lab, a highly interdisciplinary research program to engineer and deploy innovative biomedical imaging systems that address unmet clinical needs in neurosurgical navigation, cardiovascular disease, women’s health, cancer detection and treatment.  Before Johns Hopkins, she obtained a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University and spent a year abroad at the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden Hospital in the UK. Dr Bell is also the recipient of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35.

Jeanette Bohg Assistant Professor at Stanford and Guest Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent SystemsJeannette Bohg is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Stanford and Guest Researcher at the Autonomous Motion Department of MPI. Her research focuses on perception for autonomous robotic manipulation and grasping, and she is specifically interested in developing methods that are goal-directed, real-time and multi-modal such that they can provide meaningful feedback for execution and learning. Before joining the Autonomous Motion lab in January 2012, she was a PhD student at the Computer Vision and Active Perception lab (CVAP) at KTH in Stockholm. Her thesis on Multi-modal scene understanding for Robotic Grasping was performed under the supervision of Prof. Danica Kragic. She studied at Chalmers in Gothenburg and at the Technical University in Dresden where she received her Master in Art and Technology and her Diploma in Computer Science, respectively.

Maria Chiara Carozza Professor of Biorobotics at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSUP)After graduating in Physics at the university of Pisa and obtaining a PhD in Engineering, Maria Chiara Carozza became Professor of Biorobotics. She was Director of the Research Department, Coordinator of the SSSUP Laboratory ARTS and elected Rector of SSSUP in 2007. As well as being involved in many EU and multinational projects such as CYBERLEGS, ROBOCASA, WAY, CogLaboration, Nanobiotouch, Evryon, SmartHand, Neurobotics, RobotCub and CyberHand, she is also active in politics. She was Minister of Education, University and Research in the Letta Government developing a national research program and remains active in Italian Parliament. Recipient of many awards, Dr Carozza has published more than 80 ISI publications,130 papers, holds 15 patents and is active in international conferences and professional societies. Her primary interest remain improving conditions for all in society through bioengineering, HRI, humanoid robotics, intelligent environments, prosthetics, tactile sensors and artificial skin.

Helen Chan Wolf Original Shakey Team at SRI InternationalHelen Chan Wolf joined the SRI AI Group in 1966 and worked on Shakey the world’s first mobile autonomous robot. In 2017 Shakey was honored by an IEEE Milestone. Shakey was the first robot to embody artificial intelligence, to perceive its surroundings, deduce facts, make a plan to achieve a goal, navigate from place to place, monitor execution of the plan, and improve through learning. Wolf’s job was to work with the images and extract coordinates for Shakey. Her research papers included scene analysis, image matching and map guided interpretation of remotely sensed images. She was also one of the pioneers of automated facial recognition.

Neha Chaudhry Founder of Walk to Beat / Bristol Robotics Lab IncubatorAfter studying a Masters Degree in Marketing at UWE Bristol, Product Design Engineer Neha Chaudhry went on to develop award winning Walk to Beat. Inspired by her late grandad who suffered from Parkinson’s for 8 years, her product is a robotic walking stick with an innovative technology that gives out pulses in the handle – it’s discreet and looks good, so people feel empowered instead of disabled. She has won five prizes for her work including three awards for entrepreneurship, and the Entrepreneurship award – European Robotics Forum.

Sonia Chernova Assistant Professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia TechSonia Chernova is the Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early-Career Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She received her Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab and as Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute prior to joining Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab, working on developing robots that are able to effectively operate in human environments. Her research interests span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adjustable autonomy, human computation and cloud robotics.

Maartje De Graaf Postdoctoral Research Associate Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown UniversityMaartje De Graaf joined Brown’s Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative in 2017 with a Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to investigate the underlying psychological and cognitive processes of how people explain robot behaviors, and whether and how these processes differentiate from how people explain human behaviors. Before starting at Brown University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication Science, University of Twente, The Netherlands. She has a Bachelor of Business Administration in Communication Management, a Master of Science in Communication Studies and a PhD in Human-Robot Interaction.

Kay Firth-Butterfield Project Head for AI and Machine Learning at World Economic Forum / Executive Committee Vice-Chair for IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in AI and Autonomous Systems / CoFounder of AI Austin Kay Firth-Butterfield is a Barrister and Judge who works on the societal impact of AI and robotics. She is also a Distinguished Scholar of the Robert E Strauss Center at the University of Texas, where she cofounded the Consortium for Law and Policy of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. She is the former Chief Officer of the Lucid.ai Ethics Advisory Panel and Vice-Chair of The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in AI and Autonomous Systems. Additionally, she is a Partner in the Cognitive Finance group and an adjunct Professor of Law. She advises governments, think tanks, businesses, inter-governmental bodies and non-profits about artificial intelligence, law and policy.

Gabby Frierson aka RoboGabby Student at Cane Bay Middle SchoolGabby is a young middle schooler who posts about building and programming robots as “RoboGabby”. Her goal is to attract more young girls, like herself, to exploring STEM. Gabby shares tutorials on VEX IQ, ROBOTC, Robot Virtual Worlds, Python, Java and is currently shooting some new tutorials. Her sheros are Katherine Johnson and Ayanna Howard who have proved that all girls of color, or just girls in general can be into STEM, robotics and more.

Frances Gabe VALE: 1915-2016 Inventor and roboticistFrances Gabe was a renowned inventor, and a woman ahead of her time. Daughter of a builder, she was happier on the building site than in school “which moved too slow for me”. As an adult she took issue with housework. “Housework is a thankless, unending job,” she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996. “It’s a nerve-twangling bore. Who wants it? Nobody!” Touring the US speaking to women’s groups, she self funded, and over 15 years, built her prototype house, where she lived for most of her life. She patented 68 different inventions, perhaps most cleverly her insitu dishwashing drawer and clothes laundering cupboards. But by the time she died in Dec 2016 aged 101, few people remembered her passion for automating ‘women’s work’, let alone celebrated her as the world’s first self taught female roboticist.

Simone Giertz aka Queen of Shitty Robots Inventor, Youtuber and DIY Astronaut Simone Giertz started building robots as a child, however it wasn’t the career she had planned, which ranged from studying physics in Stockholm, to being an MMA sports journalist and working on Sweden’s website. She started a youtube channel for her comedy sketches and ended up showing off her ‘shitty robots’ and blowing up the internet. In an interview with Paper she describes how she got tired of being too serious and started to enjoy everything that she did. Now Simone is in San Francisco as a part time host of Tested and continuing her own Youtube. You can support her on Patreon.

Suzanne Gildert CoFounder & CSO of Kindred.AISuzanne Gildert is co-founder and CSO of Kindred AI building personal robots that use machine learning to recognize patterns and make decisions. She oversees the design and engineering of the company’s human-like robots and is responsible for the development of cognitive architectures that allow these robots to learn about themselves and their environments. Before founding Kindred, Suzanne worked as a physicist at D-Wave, designing and building superconducting quantum processors, and as a researcher in quantum artificial intelligence software applications. She received her PhD in experimental physics from the University of Birmingham and likes science outreach, retro tech art, coffee, cats, electronic music and extreme lifelogging. She is a published author of a book of art and poetry.

Raia Hadsell Research Scientist at Google DeepMindRaia Hadsell joined DeepMind in London in early 2014, to extend her research interests in robotics, neural networks, and real world learning systems. After an undergraduate degree in religion and philosophy from Reed College, Raia did a computer science PhD with Yann LeCun, at NYU, focused on machine learning using Siamese neural nets (often called a ‘triplet loss’ today) and on deep learning for mobile robots in the wild. Her thesis, ‘Learning Long-range vision for offroad robots’, was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation award in 2009. She spent a post-doc at CMU Robotics Institute, working with Drew Bagnell and Martial Hebert, and then became a research scientist at SRI International, at the Vision and Robotics group in Princeton, NJ. Her current work focuses on a number of fundamental challenges in AGI, including continual and transfer learning, deep reinforcement learning, and neural models of navigation.

Sarah Hensley MIT EECS Angle Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar at MIT & NASASarah Hensley is in the SuperUROP program at MIT which combines her undergraduate and masters EE studies with “real world research” at the Jet Propulsion Lab and the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Sarah is continuing to work on evaluating the force and torque control capabilities of Valkyrie’s series elastic actuators, in readiness for space-related tasks such as opening airlock hatches, attaching and removing power cables, repairing equipment, and retrieving samples.

Anjali Jaiprakash Advance QLD Research Fellow, Australian Center for Robotic Vision QUTAnjali Jaiprakash is a life sciences researcher who embraces novel technologies to solve medical challenges. She has experience in the fields of medical robotics, medical devices, orthopaedics, trauman, bone and cartilage biology, with research in hospital and clinical settings. Anjali is the core scientist for 2 research teams; Developing vision and control systems for robotic knee arthroscopy; and Developing a universal retinal diagnostic system. She was also a finalist for Imperial College London’s 2016 Best Project Award and recipient of the 2017 Tall Poppy Science Award from the Australian Institute of Policy and Science.

Leslie P Kaelbling Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Research Director of CSAIL at MITLeslie Kaelbling has previously held positions at Brown University, the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, and at Teleos Research. She received an A. B. in Philosophy in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science in 1990, both from Stanford University. Prof. Kaelbling has done substantial research on designing situated agents, mobile robotics, reinforcement learning, and decision-theoretic planning. In 2000, she founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research where she currently serves as editor-in-chief. Prof. Kaelbling is an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, a former member of the AAAI Executive Council, the 1997 recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, a trustee of IJCAII and a fellow of the AAAI.

Valery Komissarova Hardware VC at Grishin RoboticsValery Komissarova is a robotics investor with Grishin Robotics. Prior to that, she oversaw the internal and external relations at the internet company Mail.Ru Group, which is the biggest player in Eastern Europe, for 4 years, navigating the company’s communication policy through numerous M&As and IPOs as well as fast growth from 300 employees to 3,000. She has an extensive technological background in software engineering and systems architecture and has written books and articles about topics ranging from developing drivers to information security. Valery studied international business and management at Bournemouth University, and she also has a diploma from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and Certificate in IR of the Investor Relations Society UK.

Sharon (Soon Bok) Lee CEO of Robot of the FutureThe first product from Korean startup Robot Of The Future is Windowmate – a robot windowcleaner. CEO Sharon (Soon Bok) Lee founded the company in mid 2014, developed the IP and prototypes and was selected by the Korean Govt for a Silicon Valley Startup Program. Since then, Sharon has been rolling out a global sales campaign starting with Japan and then moving to Europe, with use cases being both residential for high density apartment living and commercial. Sharon brings lengthy experience as a technology manager and CEO to Robot of the Future and was awarded the 2015 VIP ASIA Award for CEOs.

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Wanxi Liu Systems Analyst at Intuitive Surgical and Robotics BloggerWanxi Liu graduated from Stanford as a Mechanical Engineering master in June, 2015, and is currently working at Intuitive Surgical as Systems Analyst (Control/Robotics Engineer). She did her undergraduate in Optical Engineering, but her strong interests in personal assistance or service robots and medical robots lead her to developing robotic simulations, haptics applictions, and mechatronic system design. She also write regular robotics blogs. “For those of you who are interested in robotics, read Chinese, and use WeChat – search for official account ROBOTICS and you’ll find all the interesting articles I wrote about various aspects of robots. Hit Follow if you like them!”

Linda Pouliot CoFounder of Neato & Dishcraft RoboticsLinda Pouliot is a serial entrepreneur with deep expertise in robotics, product management, operations and manufacturing. In 2004 she co-founded Neato Robotics and was VP Product Management and Operations, leading the design, development and manufacturing of Neato’s laser guided vacuum cleaner. The company is now the number two player globally in consumer robotic vacuums. After Neato, Linda became the Chief Operating Officer of Adiri (acquired by ReliaBrand), where she oversaw the redesign and manufacturing of the international award winning Adiri bottle. She then co-founded the game advertising platform Mahoot. Linda is currently the Founder/CEO of Dishcraft Robotics.

Julie Schoenfeld Founder & CEO of StrobeJulie Schoenfeld is a serial entrepreneur, and Founder and CEO of Stobe Inc., a technology company that develops laser-imaging for self-driving cars. Recently acquired by GM for an undisclosed amount, Strobe will be folded into GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise Automation. Schoenfeld has been CEO of four other companies in her career and is adept at raising venture capital and navigating aquisitions. Her first company, Net Effect, was acquired by Ask Jeeves for $288 million in stock. More recently she helped Perfect Market navigate its aquisition by Taboola.

Catherine Simon President and Founder of Innorobo / InnoEchoCatherine Simon is the President and Founder of Innorobo, one of Europe’s key events dedicated to the service robotics sector, which brings together robotics companies, laboratories, start-ups, inventors, SMEs and funding providers in order to drive innovation. She also founded InnoEcho, a business strategy consultancy for the new technologies sector. Innorobo began as a regional show in Lyon, France, and recently moved to Paris to reflect its recent growth; the 2017 Innorobo event ran over three days and attracted 170 exhibitors and over 7K visitors.

Raquel Urtasun Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, Head of Uber ATG, Co-Founder of Vector Institute for AIRaquel Urtasun is the Head of Uber ATG Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. She is a world leading expert in machine perception for self-driving cars, and her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics and remote sensing.

Stella Uzochukwu-Denis Program Coordinator at Odyssey Educational FoundationStella Uzochukwu-Denis is an electrical engineer and the founder of The Odyssey Educational Foundation, a Nigerian NGO that provides STEM education and robotics experiences to school children in Abuja – a region of Nigeria where militant attacks have kept hundreds of thousands of children out of school in recent years. The foundation’s main goal is to encourage children, and girls in particular, to pursue careers in science and technology. The foundation has trained well over 450 school age girls since its launch in 2013. “My utlimate goal is to ensure that kids become college-ready, career-ready and world-ready.”

Aimee van Wynsberghe Co-Founder of Foundation for Responsible Robotics, Assistant Professor at Delft University of TechnologyAimee van Wynsberghe is assistant professor of ethics and technology at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She is co-founder and president of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics. She is also a member of the 4TU center for ethics and technology where she heads the robotics task force. With the help of an NWO personal research grant she is researching how we can responsibly design service robots. Her past research looked at evaluating and designing care robots.

Do you have a story to tell about how visibility helped your robotics career? Would you like to nominate someone for next year’s list? Do you want to help organize Women in Robotics events or join the Women in Robotics network? We’d love to hear from you. Know of any great women in robotics who should be on this list next year? Check the lists from our previous years (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016), and feel free to leave your nominations in the comments section below, or email us at nominations [at] womeninrobotics.org.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2015)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2016)
• How to hire women from Silicon Valley Robotics
• Five women robotics experts from Silicon Valley share their stories
• Steffi Paepcke on Robots, women and design: Opportunities abound

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Recent news about growth of Chinese robotics and related AI indicate just how massive their investments are and how well they are paying off. For example, 90% of the personal robots on display at the IFA consumer electronics trade show held in Berlin in September were developed and manufactured by Chinese companies. 

Further, Preqin reported that Q3 venture-backed deals totaled $49 billion. Included in the top 10 deals were Uber-competitor Grab’s raising $2 billion from SoftBank and Didi Chuxing and Alibaba’s $1.1 bn investment in eBay-like Tokopedia and $.8 bn to Cainiao (see below). Half of the top 10 were in Asia; only three were for US-based companies.

Three Chinese companies stand out with Texas-size robotics-related activity: Midea/Kuka is planning to sell 50-55% of its annual $3 bn output in China by 2020; Siasun’s robots are exported to 30+ countries; and Alibaba is investing $15 billion over five years in internal logistics for their growing e-commerce business.

Alibaba (BABA:NYSE)

Amazon take note: China’s largest smart warehouse is manned by mobile robots moving shelves to picking and packing stations — and they look amazingly similar to Amazon’s Kiva robots.

Alibaba is emulating Amazon in putting robots into the logistics warehouses it operates for sorting, picking and moving applications. Through its investment in logistics company Cainiao, and similar investments in local startups Geek+ and Quicktron, both of which make Kiva-like mobile robots and provide extensive network and traffic management software for e-commerce distribution centers. Cainiao currently executes 57 million deliveries a day. Alibaba, which had owned 47% of Cainiao, has invested a further $807 million to increase its stake to 51%. Alibaba’s goal for Cainiao is to delivery anywhere in China within 24 hours and anywhere in the world within 72.

Warehousing robots aren’t Alibaba’s only play. They are also investing in service robots through their joint venture with SoftBank Robotics and Foxconn and also augmented reality big-data-driven logistics navigation and picking solutions as well as other types of AGVs for towing, moving and sorting pallets, boxed goods and shelves.

In addition to the Cainiao investment, Alibaba also invested $1.1 billion in PT Tokopedia, a large e-Bay-like service covering Indonesia. Overall, Alibaba has committed $15 billion over the next five years to build out a global logistics network.

Midea Group (000333:SHE)

Midea, China’s 4th largest consumer products manufacturer, and the country’s biggest maker of air conditioners, refrigerators and appliances, has a masterplan to revamp itself into China’s leading robot manufacturer.

• Last year, for around $4.5 billion, they acquired the world’s 4th largest robot manufacturer, Germany-based Kuka AG.
• At their air conditioner plant, Midea has deployed 800 robots and replaced 24,000 workers in their quest to improve quality and reduce costs.
• In another factory, Midea engineers have made it so six robots produce and assemble remote control devices every seven seconds with 100% quality.
• Early this year they set up an alliance with Israel-based advanced motion control and automation systems company Servotronix.
• Then they invested another $1.5 billion in a new factory in southern China to manufacturer and assemble service and industrial robots (7,000 and 2,000 per year respectively).
• These robots will be for sale as well as for internal use and the goal is that by 2025, 17,000 industrial robots will be produced at that factory in addition to Kuka’s goals at Kuka’s separate facilities.
• Kuka plans to sell 50-55% of its annual output ($3 bn+) in China by 2020.
• Midea is doubling the number of research engineers working on product development and AI. Research projects include robotic bartenders, consumer food processors and industrial-grade food production robots.

Midea’s investments and strategic alliances underscore their ambition to lead in automation and robotics within China and, later, globally.

Siasun Robot & Automation (300024:SHE)

According to The Wall Street Journal, Siasun’s 2016 revenue was $2.02 bn which was 20.47% greater than FY 2015. Forbes rates Siasun as #20 on the Innovative Growth Companies list with a market cap of $5.1 bn and 2,500 employes.

Siasun focuses on four verticals: advanced manufacturing equipment, rail transit automation, autonomous energy equipment and advanced robotics (across all divisions). In addition to fixed and mobile industrial robots, Siasun has a line of clean room robots and a new collaborative robot. They also have an extensive line of mobile robots for material handling, warehouses, restaurants, public spaces and indoor cleaning and security. Online retailer JD.com has teamed up with Siasun to automate JD’s logistic network and JD says that it also plans to develop delivery drones and driverless vehicles.

Qu Daokui, president of Siasun, said the company is looking to invest in robot technology in Europe and the United States, with acquisitions starting from at least $1 billion. “We are interested in companies that have state-of-the-art technologies or have a key presence in the industry chain,” Qu said recently at the 2017 World Robot Conference in Beijing.

Currently, the Shenyang-based company’s industrial robots and other products are exported to more than 30 countries and regions. Moreover, two-thirds of Siasun’s customers are foreign companies. According to China Daily, Siasun robots are at work in Ford and General Motors auto plants in the U.S.

Last year, Siasun teamed up with Israeli companies and universities in a China-Israel robot research institute in Guangzhou where they are jointly working on artificial intelligence which Qu billed as of great importance to robots by giving them “wings”.

Bottom Line

Many critics and pundits warn that the free-flowing incentives China has been giving to effect its 5-year plans and Made in China 2025 program has produced fraud, false figures and unknown results. They worry about overcapacity and that many of the new companies involved in robotics are just in it to get the subsidies and tax breaks.

Nevertheless, the three companies profiled above attest to the fact that China’s overall goal to become a high-tech maker and user of robotics and AI is working… and working BIG. Texas BIG.

Tiny mobile robots are learning to work with insects in the hope the creatures’ sensitive antennae and ability to squeeze into small spaces can be put to use serving humans.

With a soft electronic whirr, a rather unusual looking ant trundles along behind a column of its arthropod comrades as they march off to fetch some food.

While the little insects begin ferrying tiny globules of sugar back home, their mechanical companion bustles forward to effortlessly pick up the entire container and carry it back to the nest.

It is a dramatic demonstration of how robots can be introduced and accepted into insect societies.

But the research, which is being conducted as part of the EU-funded CyBioSys project, could be an important step towards using robots to subtly control, or work alongside, animals or humans.

‘The idea is to be able to solve (a) problem with a better solution than they (the robots and insects) can produce individually,’ said Dr Bertrand Collignon, who is leading the research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland.

The robots, which ‘live’ with the ants, pick up signs that food has been discovered through a camera mounted inside the nest. The camera alerts the robots when it detects an increasing numbers of ants are departing – a sign that food has been found.

The robots – reprogrammed off-the-shelf Thymio bots managed by simple Raspberry Pi computers – then use sensors to follow the columns of exiting ants. Once the ants have led their robotic counterparts to their discovery, the robots take over, using their superior muscle power to lug it home.

Dr Collignon described this as a ‘cyber-biological system’, which improves both on the natural order, and on what robots could achieve on their own. By getting ants and robots to collaborate, each community plays to its strengths, he says.

‘The ants are good at exploring the environment very efficiently, with many scouts patrolling the vicinity of the nest at the same time,’ said Dr Collignon, who is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie action fellow. ‘But individual ants are not able to transport large amounts of food and some can get lost between the food and the nest.’

‘By getting ants and robots to collaborate, each community plays to its strengths.’

Dr Bertrand Collignon, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Robots are like pack animals in comparison, carrying an order of magnitude more food than an ant can, and accomplishing in a few minutes what would have taken the ants hours.

Dr Collignon believes it is the first project to consider an insect swarm as a biosensor and then embed in a robot the ability to extract data from the colony.

But he also believes this research could be combined with other work teaching robots to communicate with animals. Instead of relying on top-down instructions — like a shepherd dog herding sheep — this would work by subtly influencing them from a position as one of the group.

As many social insects such as ants and bees can form aggressive colonies that normally do not respond well to outsiders, influencing them from within may offer a new approach.

In a previous EU-funded project, LEURRE, a team pioneered the creation of small mobile robots that could interact with cockroaches and influence their collective behaviour.

When kept in a pen together, cockroaches will gradually gather under the same dark shelter. They achieve this simply by following two rules: stay close to other cockroaches, and head for somewhere dark.

But when the researchers released small robots into the pen programmed with slightly different rules — stay close to other cockroaches but prefer a lighter refuge — in time the cockroaches, along with the robots, gathered in the lighter shelter instead.

Dr Collignon believes that the two types of robotic work – collaboration and communication – could find applications in search and rescue, exploring environments too dangerous or inaccessible for humans. Eventually, small animals could be used to get into restricted environments such as collapsed buildings.

By integrating artificial systems, such as robots, into more natural ones – such as a warehouse full of chickens – it could lead to new solutions to help control animal behaviour on farms. An example might be preventing deadly mass panic attacks amongst intensively reared animals by using robots that can detect the early signs of an impending stampede and diverting one by behaving in a different way.

‘The first step is to be able to track what natural agents are doing and react appropriately to that,’ he said. ‘That’s already a tricky thing. Once you have sensed what nature is doing, you can then interact. The robotic agent can do what it has been designed for and then act on the system.’

It measures the speed of the drone relative to the air, by measuring the positive and negative pressure differences around the drone. When purchased, they usually come together with pitot tube and connection cables. It is recommended for advanced users or drones only, as it necessitates an extra layer of control and tuning. Through pitot tube, the pressure is measured and then this is converted to air speed. Air speed varies with the square root of air pressure. The pitot tube, which takes in the air, transmits it to the sensor through rubber tubing. The sensor is connected to flight controller through a 4 wire I²C cable. Air speed of drone is different than its speed relative to ground. When calculating flight time for a certain distance, the ground speed is used. For example, if the aircraft is moving in the air with 200 km/h, into a headwind of 5 km/h, then its ground speed is 195 km/h. This is how fast the shadow of the aircraft moves on the ground. When airspeed is corrected for pressure and temperature, true airspeed is obtained. This is the true speed at which the aircraft moves through the air fluid that surrounds it.

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The European project AEROARMS is one of 10 innovations selected to compete for the Innovation Radar Prize in the “Industrial & Enabling Tech” category. AEROARMS is a European project that proposes to develop the first UAV robotic system with multiple arms and advanced manipulation capabilities for industrial inspection and maintenance.

The selected innovation is a torque-free contact device for integration into multi-rotor platforms. This technology was developed by CATEC research center, within the AEROARMS project. It enables drones to perform inspections that require contact, like ultrasonic. This is a major step for drones to not only “see” from the air but also “touch and feel”. The drone presents a tilted-rotor configuration that allows very precise movements and a contact device that decouples and dampens external perturbations (wind, external forces while touching) from the aerial platform.

AEROARMS is an ongoing H2020 project with more than 5.7 million euros budget, participants from five countries and nine partners, including the University of Seville, coordinator of AERAORMS, CATEC, the Technical University of Catalonia, the German DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics and the companies TÜV NORD Systems GmbH and Elektra UAS GmbH, the French Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique, the Italian Consorzio C.R.E.A.T.E, and the Swiss companies ALSTOM Inspection Robotics and Sensima Inspection. The project will finish in 2019.

Mike Toscano, the former president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, emphatically declared at the September RobotLab forum that “anyone who claims to know the future of the [robotics] industry is lying, I mean no one could’ve predicted the computing mobile revolution.” These words acted as a guiding principle when walking around RoboBusiness in Silicon Valley last week.

The many keynotes, pitches and exhibits in the Santa Clara Convention Center had the buzz of an industry racing towards mass adoption, similar to the early days of personal computing. The inflection point in the invention that changed the world, the PC, was 1995. During that year, Sun Microsystems released Java to developers with promise of “write once, publish anywhere,” followed weeks later by Microsoft’s consumer software package, Windows ’95. Greater accessibility led to full ubiquity and applications unthinkable by the original engineers. In many ways, the robot market is standing a few years before its own watershed moment.

In my last post, I highlighted mechanical musicians and painters, this week it is time to see what is cooking, literally, in robotics. Next year, startup Moley plans to introduce the “first fully-automated and integrated intelligent cooking robot,” priced under $100,000. It already has a slick video that is reminiscent of Lily’s Robotics’ rise to the headlines; needless to say Moley has created quite a stir in the culinary community.

Austin Gresham, executive chef at The Kitchen by Wolfgang Puck is very skeptical, “Professional chefs have to improvise constantly as they prepare dishes. If a recipe says to bake a potato for 25 minutes and the potatoes are more or less dense than the previous batch, then cooking times will vary. I would challenge any machine to make as good a mashed potato (from scratch).” Gresham’s challenge is really the crux of the matter, creativity is driven by human’s desire for food, without taste could a robot chef have the intuition to improvise?

Acting as a judge of the RoboBusiness Pitch Fire Competition, I met entrepreneurs undiscouraged by the market challenges ahead. In addition, throughout my Valley visit, I encountered five startups building commercial and consumer culinary applications. Any time this happens within such a short timespan, I stop and take notice. Automated restaurants seem to be a growing trend across the nation with a handful of upstarts on both coasts. Eatsa is a chain of quinoa-salad restaurants sans cashiers and servers. Customers order via mobile devices or on-site kiosks, picking up their ready dishes through an automated floor-to-ceiling lockbox fixture. However, behind the wall Eatsa has hourly workers manually preparing the salad bowls. Cafe X in San Francisco offers a completely automated experience with a robot-arm barista preparing, brewing and serving espressos, cappuccinos, and Americanos. After raising $5 million from venture investors, Cafe X plans to expand with robot kiosks throughout the city. Probably the most end-to-end automated restaurant concept I visited can be found tucked away on Berkeley University’s Global Campus called BBox by Nourish. BBox is currently running a trial on campus and planning to open its first store next year to conquer the multi-billion dollar breakfast market with egg sandwiches and gourmet coffee (see video below).

According to Nourish’s CEO Greg Becker, BBox will “reengineer the food ecosystem, from farm to mouth.” Henry Hu, Cafe X’s founder, also aims to revolutionize “the supply chain, recipes, maintenance, and customer support.” To date, the most successful robotic concept is Zume Pizza. Founder Julia Collins made headlines last year with her groundbreaking spin on the traditional pizzeria. Today she is taking on Dominos dollar for dollar in the San Francisco area, delivering pies in under 22 minutes. Collins, a former Chief Financial Officer of a Mexican restaurant chain, challenges the food industry, “Why don’t we just re-write the rules— forget about everything we learned about running a restaurant?” Already, Zume is serving hundreds of satisfied customers daily, proving at least with pizza it is possible to innovate.

“We realized we could automate more of the unsafe repetitive tasks of operating a kitchen using flexible, dynamic robots,” explains Collins, who currently employees over 50 human workers that do everything from software engineering to supervising the robots to delivering the pizza. “The humans that work at Zume are making dough from scratch, working with farmers to source products, recipe development—more collaborative, creative human tasks. [We have] lower rent costs because we don’t have a storefront; delivery only and lower labor costs. We reinvest those savings into locally sourced, responsibly farmed food.” Collins also boasts that her human workforce has access to free vision, dental, and health insurance due to the cost savings.

Even Shake Shack could have competition very soon as Google Ventures-backed Momentum Machines is launching an epicurean robot bistro in San Francisco’s chic SoMa district later next year. The machine that has been clocked at 400 burgers an hour, guarantees “to slice toppings, grill a patty, assemble, and bag the burger without any help from humans,” at prices that “everyone can afford.” Momentum’s proposition prompted former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi to controversially state that “it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries.” Comments like Rensi’s do not further the industry, in fact it probably led to the controversy last month with the launch of Bodega, an automated convenience store that even enraged Lin-Manuel Miranda below.

The bad press was multiplied further by Elizabeth Segran’s article in Fast Company, which read, “the major downside to this concept — should it take off — is that it would put a lot of mom-and-pop stores out of business.” Founder Paul McDonald responded on Medium, “Rather than take away jobs, we hope Bodega will help create them. We see a future where anyone can own and operate a Bodega — delivering relevant items and a great retail experience to places no corner store would ever open.” While Bodega is not exactly a robotic concept, it is similar to the automated marketplace of AmazonGo with 10 computer vision sensors tracking the consumer and inventory management via a mobile checkout app. “We’re shrinking the store and putting it in a box,” said McDonald. The founder has publicly declared war on 7-Eleven’s 5,000 stores, in addition to the 4 million vending machines across the US. Realizing the pressures to innovate, last year 7-Eleven made history with the first drone Slurpee delivery. “Drone delivery is the ultimate convenience for our customers and these efforts create enormous opportunities to redefine convenience,” said Jesus H. Delgado-Jenkins, 7-Eleven EVP and Chief Merchandising Officer. “This delivery marks the first time a retailer has worked with a drone delivery company to transport immediate consumables from store to home. In the future, we plan to make the entire assortment in our stores available for delivery to customers in minutes. Our customers have demanding schedules, are on-the-go 24/7 and turn to us to help navigate the challenges of their daily lives. We look forward to working with Flirtey to deliver to our customers exactly what they need, whenever and wherever they need it.”

As mom & pop stores compete for market share, one wonders with more Kitchen OS concepts if home cooked meals will join the list of outdated cultural trends. Serenti Kitchen in San Francisco plans to bring the Keurig pod revolution to food with its proprietary machine that includes prepared culinary recipe pods that are dropped into a bowl and whipped to perfection by a robotic arm (see above). Serenti Founder Tim Chen was featured last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit, which reconvenes later this month in Seattle. Chen said, “We’re building something that’s quite hard, mechanically, so it’s more from a vision where we wanted to initially develop a machine that could cook, and make cooking easier and automate cooking for the home.” Initially Chen plans to target business catering, “In the near term, we need to focus on placing these machines where there’s the highest amount of density, which is right in the offices,” but long-term Serenti plans to join the appliance counter. Chen explained his inspiration, “Our Mom is a great cook, so they’ve watched her execute the meals. Then realized a lot of it is repetitive, and what recipes are, is essentially just a machine language.” Chen’s observations are shared by many in the IoT and culinary space, as this year’s finalists in the Smart Kitchen Summit include more robotic of inventions, such as Crepe Robot that automatically dispense, cook and flavors France’s favorite snack and GammaChef, a robotic appliance that promises like Serenti to whip up anything in a bowl. Clearly, these inventions will eventually lead to a redesign of the physical home kitchen space that is already crowded with appliances. Some innovators are even using robotic arms tucked away in cabinets and specialized drawers, ovens and refrigeration units that communicate seamlessly to serve up dinner.

The automated kitchen illuminated by Moley and others might be coming sooner than anyone expects; then again it could be a rotten egg. In almost every Sci-Fi movie and television show the kitchen is reduced to a replicator that synthesizes food to the wishes of the user. Three years ago, it was rumored that food-powerhouse Nestle was working on a machine that could produce nutritional supplements on demand, code name Iron Man. While Iron Man has yet to be released to the public, it does illustrate the convergence of 3D printing, robotics and kitchen appliances. While the Consumer Electronics Show is still months away, my appetite has just been whetted for more automated culinary treats, stay tuned!

Two reputable research resources are reporting that the robotics industry is growing more rapidly than expected. BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is conservatively projecting that the market will reach $87 billion by 2025; Tractica, incorporating the robotic and AI elements of the emerging self-driving industry, is forecasting the market will reach $237 billion by 2022.

Both research firms acknowledge that yesterday’s robots — which were blind, big, dangerous and difficult to program and maintain — are being replaced and supplemented with newer, more capable ones. Today’s new – and future robots will – have voice and language recognition, access to super-fast communications, data and libraries of algorithms, learning capability, mobility, portability and dexterity. These new precision robots can sort and fill prescriptions, pick and pack warehouse orders, sort, inspect, process and handle fruits and vegetables, plus a myriad of other industrial and non-industrial tasks, most faster than humans, yet all the while working safely along side them.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Gaining Robotic Advantage, June 2017, 13 pages, free

BCG suggests that business executives be aware of ways robots are changing the global business landscape and think and act now. They see robotics-fueled changes coming in retail, logistics, transportation healthcare, food processing, mining and agriculture.

BCG cites the following drivers:

• Private investment in the robotic space has continued to amaze with exponential year-over-year funding curves and sensational billion dollar acquisitions.
• Prices continue to fall on robots, sensors, CPUs and communications while capabilities continue to increase.
• Robot programming is being transformed by easier interfaces, GUIs and ROS.
• The prospect of a self-driving vehicles industry disrupting transportation is propelling a talent grab and strategic acquisitions by competing international players with deep pockets.
• 40% of robotic startups have been in the consumer sector and will soon augment humans in high-touch fields such as health and elder care.

 BCG also cites the following example as an example of paying close attention to gain advantage:

“Amazon gained a first-mover advantage in 2012 when it bought Kiva Systems, which makes robots for warehouses. Once a Kiva customer, Amazon acquired the robot maker to improve the productivity and margins of its network of warehouses and fulfillment centers. The move helped Amazon maintain its low costs and expand its rapid delivery capabilities. It took five years for a Kiva alternative to hit the market. By then, Amazon had a jump on its rivals and had developed an experienced robotics team, giving the company a sustainable edge.”

Tractica

Robotics Market Forecast – June 2017, 26 pages, $4,200
Drones for Commercial Applications – June 2017, 196 pages, $4,200
AI for Automotive Applications – May 2017, 63 pages, $4,200
Consumer Robotics – May 2017, 130 pages, $4,200

The key story is that industrial robotics, the traditional pillar of the robotics market, dominated by Japanese and European robotics manufacturers, has given way to non-industrial robot categories like personal assistant robots, UAVs, and autonomous vehicles, with the epicenter shifting toward Silicon Valley, which is now becoming a hotbed for artificial intelligence (AI), a set of technologies that are, in turn, driving a lot of the most significant advancements in robotics. Consequently, Tractica forecasts that the global robotics market will grow rapidly between 2016 and 2022, with revenue from unit sales of industrial and non-industrial robots rising from $31 billion in 2016 to $237.3 billion by 2022.  The market intelligence firm anticipates that most of this growth will be driven by non-industrial robots.

Tractica is headquartered in Boulder and analyzes global market trends and applications for robotics and related automation technologies within consumer, enterprise, and industrial marketplaces and related industries.

General Research Reports

• Global autonomous mobile robots market, June 2017, 95 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global autonomous mobile robots market will grow at a CAGR of more than 14% through 2021.
• Global underwater exploration robots, June 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $3,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global underwater exploration robots market will grow at a CAGR of 13.92 % during the period 2017-2021.
• Household vacuum cleaners market, March 2017, 134 pages, Global Market Insights, $4,500
  Global Market Insights forecasts that household vacuum cleaners market size will surpass $17.5 billion by 2024 and global shipments are estimated to exceed 130 million units by 2024, albeit at a low 3.0% CAGR. Robotic vacuums show a slightly higher growth CAGR.
• Global unmanned surface vehicle market, June 2017, Value Market Research, $3,950
  Value Market Research analyzed drivers (security and mapping) versus restraints such as AUVs and ROVs and made their forecasts for the period 2017-2023.
• Innovations in Robotics, Sensor Platforms, Block Chain, and Artificial Intelligence for Homeland Security, May 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $6,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report covers recent developments such as co-bots for surveillance applications, airborne sensor platforms for border security, blockchain tech, AI as first responder, and tech for detecting nuclear threats.
• Top technologies in advanced manufacturing and automation, April 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $4,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report focuses on exoskeletons, metal and nano 3D printing, co-bots and agile robots – all of which are in the top 10 technologies covered.
• Mobile robotics market, December 2016, 110 pages, Zion Market Research, $4,199
  Global mobile robotics market will reach $18.8 billion by end of 2021, growing at a CAGR of slightly above 13.0% between 2017 and 2021.
• Unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market, May 2017, MarketsandMarkets, $5,650
  MarketsandMarkets forecasts the unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market to grow from $470.1 Million in 2017 to $938.5 Million by 2022, at a CAGR of 14.83%.
• Military/Civil UAS markets, May 2017, 608 pages, Teal Group
  The Teal Group’s 2016 world military market study estimates that UAV production will soar from current worldwide UAV production of $2.8 billion annually in 2016 to $9.4 billion in 2025, a 15.4% CAGR and that civil UAS production will soar from $2.6 billion worldwide in 2016 to $10.9 billion in 2025, a 15.4% CAGR.

Agricultural Research Reports

• Global agricultural robots market, May 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global agricultural robots market will grow steadily at a CAGR of close to 18% through 2021.
• Agriculture robots market, June 2017, TMR Research, $3,716
  Robots are poised to replace agricultural hands. They can pluck fruits, sow and reap crops, and milk cows. They carry out the tasks much faster and with a great degree of accuracy. This coupled with mandates on higher minimum pay being levied in most countries, have spelt good news for the global market for agriculture robots.
• Agricultural Robots, December 2016, 225 pages, Tractica, $4,200
  Forecasts that shipments of agricultural robots will increase from 32,000 units in 2016 to 594,000 units annually in 2024 and that the market is expected to reach $74.1 billion in annual revenue by 2024. Report, done in conjunction with The Robot Report, profiles over 165 companies involved in developing robotics for the industry.

Bottom Line

The disparity between the projections of these research reports is wide but the CAGRs are mostly all double digit. It is easy to conclude as BCG did – that the robotics industry is growing faster than expected

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Ayanna Howard, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about her work to help children with the movement disorder cerebral palsy. Howard discusses how robots and tablet can be used to “gamify” pediatric therapy. The idea is that if therapy is fun and engaging children are more likely to do it, and thus, they are more likely to see the long-term benefits of the therapy. Howard discusses how therapy is “gamified,” how a small humanoid robot is used to coach children, and how they work with pediatricians.

Ayanna Howard

Ayanna Howard, Ph.D. is Professor and Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Endowed Chair in Bioengineering in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also holds the position of Associate Chair for Faculty Development in ECE. She received her B.S. in Engineering from Brown University, her M.S.E.E. from the University of Southern California, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Her area of research is centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous systems. This work, which addresses issues of autonomous control as well as aspects of interaction with humans and the surrounding environment, has resulted in over 200 peer-reviewed publications in a number of projects – from scientific rover navigation in glacier environments to assistive robots for the home. To date, her unique accomplishments have been highlighted through a number of awards and articles, including highlights in USA Today, Upscale, and TIME Magazine, as well as being named a MIT Technology Review top young innovator and recognized as one of the 23 most powerful women engineers in the world by Business Insider.

In 2013, she also founded Zyrobotics, which is currently licensing technology derived from her research and has released their first suite of therapy and educational products for children with differing needs. From 1993-2005, Dr. Howard was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. She has also served a term as the Associate Director of Research for the Georgia Tech Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines and a term as Chair of the multidisciplinary Robotics Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech.

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The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy.

The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition consisted of four scenarios, inspired by the nuclear accident of Fukushima (Japan, 2011) and designed specifically for multi-domain human-robot teams. The first scenario is The Grand Challenge made up of three domains – sea, air, land, and the other three scenarios are made of only two domains.

The Awards, given for each scenario to the best performing teams, were introduced by Alan Winfield from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency Coordinator. “The energy, enthusiasm and spirit of cooperation among the teams competing in ERL Emergency was amazing. We witnessed not only great performances from the teams and their robots, but also the drama and excitement of last minute field repairs and workarounds to the robots”, said Alan Winfield.

The Grand Challenge (Scenario 1: land, sea, and air)

After a nuclear power plant has been struck by a potent earthquake and a tsunami, it’s time for the emergency response team to act. Due to high radiation levels, the cooperation of land, sea and air robots is essential. The robots have to find as soon as possible three missing workers and deploy an emergency kit next to them. Secondly, the robots check for any structural damage of the building and to the pipes connecting the reactor to the sea for cooling purposes. In case of damaged or leaking pipes, the corresponding valves are to be closed both in the machine room and underwater to avoid radioactive contamination. Closing the wrong valves may cause a reduction in the amount of seawater available for cooling down the reactor.

1st Prize: Telerob, Germany (land) + Universitat de Girona, Spain (sea) + INESTEC/ISEP Aerial Robotics, Portugal (air)

“Our underwater robot Sparus II AUV was used to create maps of the underwater environment and to autonomously detect some targets. The algorithms developed by master and PhD students and the robustness of the platform allowed us to obtain good results even in the challenging conditions of the competition. The multi-domain competition required the coordination with the other robots (land and air), which offered us a unique opportunity for testing our communication capabilities.”, said Marc Carreras from the University of Girona.

“Autonomy was showing its advantages as well as a good situational awareness. The advanced mission documentation, which was requested in the competition, enables the first responders to get a fast and reliable situational understanding to finally reach the necessary situational ownership. The ERL Emergency competition should further focus on improving the robot-human-teaming”, said Andreas Ciossek from Telerob.

“The INESC TEC participation in ERL Emergency 2017 allowed us to validate our robotics technology in a real-world scenario with a relevant social and economical impact. Furthermore, it helped raising public awareness of the role that advanced robots can play in disaster scenarios aiding human teams in critical operations, and it confirmed once again the leading role of European robotics research”, said Eduardo Silva from ISEP/INESC TEC.

Read more about their experience here.

2nd Prize: IIS Piombino CVP, Italy (air) + Robdos, Spain, + IMM, Poland (land and sea)

3rd Prize: Raptors, Poland (air & land) + Oubot, Hungary (sea)

Survey the building and search for missing workers (Scenario 2: land and sea)

The ground and aerial robots perform a reconnaissance mission of the area and create a map of the surrounding area in order to increase the awareness of the emergency response team. Additionally, the robots find two missing workers outdoors and deploy first-aid kits near them.

1st Prize: IMM, Poland + IIS Piombino CVP, Italy

2nd Prize: Raptors Team, Poland

3rd Prize: Telerob, Germany + INESTEC/ISEP Aerial Robotics, Portugal

Pipe inspection and search for missing workers (Scenario 3: sea and air)

After the earthquake and tsunami, the pipes connecting the reactor to the sea might be leaking radioactive substances, therefore the emergency team has to find the damaged ones on land or underwater. Robots must find two missing workers: one outside the building, to whom an emergency kit should be deployed, and another one dragged by the tsunami to the sea, expected to be a casualty.

1st Prize: Universitat de Girona, Spain + INESTEC/ISEP Aerial Robotics, Portugal

2nd Prize: Tuscany Robotics Team, Italy

3rd Prize: AUV Tomkyle, Germany + HSR Search and Rescue Team, Switzerland

“Aerial robots have shown great improvements with respect to euRathlon 2015, most of them being fully operational from the first day of the competition. They have been able to quickly provide information about inaccessible areas, structural damages or other possible threats. As it happened with robots from the other two domains, aerial teams also struggled with communication issues to properly command and control their platforms. This further confirms the need for autonomous capabilities onboard the aerial robots, to become even more powerful tools for emergency response teams”, said Francisco Javier Pérez Grau from the Advanced Center for Aerospace Technologies.

Stem the leak (Scenario 4: land and sea)

The land robots have to inspect the pipes in the building’s machine room and marine robots the underwater pipes in order to close the correct valves and prevent leakage. Land and marine robots must cooperate to identify the valves and synchronize the process of closing them, by communicating directly or via their operators.

1st Prize: Telerob, Germany + Universitat de Girona, Spain

2nd Prize: Raptors, Poland + Oubot, Hungary

3rd Prize: bebot, Switzerland + AUV Tomkyle Team, Germany

Winning teams were given a diploma, prize money and in-kind, sponsored by the Platinum Sponsor IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, silver sponsors SBG systems and Texas Instruments.

In addition, Marta Palau Franco, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees’ special awards. Find out who the winners are here!

“This great event has been possible thanks to the work and effort of an amazing local organising team. Special thanks to Fausto Ferreira, the ERL Emergency 2017 Deputy Director, for his continuous support. I want to thank all the sponsors, especially our platinum sponsor IEEE OES, the project partners, referees, local associations and schools for their support. Huge thanks go to the participating teams, which were the heart of this great event. Their competitiveness pushed the robots to accomplish great results, nevertheless the competition has always been accompanied by fair play. I believe this is the perfect formula for team members to improve their professional and human skills”, said Gabriele Ferri, ERL Emergency 2017 Director.

 Watch the ERL Emergency 2017 Awards Ceremony video

More info

The European Robotics League is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n° 688441.

The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition was organised locally by the NATO STO-Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) of La Spezia, Italy.

The European Robotics League is part of the SPARC public-private partnership set up by the European Commission and euRobotics to extend Europe’s leadership in civilian robotics. SPARC’s €700 million of funding from the Commission in 2014̶20 is being combined with €1.4 billion of funding from European industry. www.eu-robotics.net/sparc

euRobotics is a European Commission-funded non-profit organisation which promotes robotics research and innovation for the benefit of Europe’s economy and society. It is based in Brussels and has more than 250-member organisations.

www.eu-robotics.net

The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy.

In addition to the Competition Awards, Marta Palau Franco from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees’ special awards.

“Behind a multi-domain competition there is always a large technical committee, I feel privileged to have worked with such an amazing team of volunteer referees, technical assistants and safety pilots and divers. We were delighted to give these awards to recognise teams’ effort, fair play and hard work. The experience of participating in this robotics competition will prove beneficial for team members to develop further their professional career”, said Marta Palau Franco.

Mapping Award, handed by Vladimir Djapic from AFAK, for good quality georeferenced undersea mapping.
Winner: AUV Team Tomkyle, Germany (sea)

Navigation Award, handed by Pino Casalino from the University of Genova, for the effort to change and adapt algorithms to navigate without a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) sensor, important for the AUV (autonomous Undersea Vehicle) navigation.
Winner: Oubot Team, Hungary (sea)

Fair Play Award, handed by Marta Palau Franco from the University of the West of England, Bristol, for lending to the Tuscany Robotics Team a wheel platform for their new robot and for lending the batteries of their aerial robot to ISEP/INESC TEC aerial team.
Winners: ENSTA Team and ENSTA Bretagne, France (land, air, sea)

Creativity Award, handed by Bernd Bruggermann from Fraunhofer FKIE, for building a land robot from scratch in less than two days when their ground platform broke.
Winner: Tuscany Robotics, Italy (land, air, sea)

Multi-domain Cooperation Award, handed by Fausto Ferreira from CMRE, for cooperation between domains. The teams used a graphical interface in which each robot from sea and air domain reported its findings in the competition arena in real-time.
Winner: Universitat de Girona, Spain (sea) + ISEP/INESC TEC, Portugal (air)

Perseverance Award, handed by Francisco Javier Perez Grau from FADA-CATEC, for hard work on the development and integration of the aerial robot. The team competed in the Grand Challenge the day after their aerial platform suffered a severe crash, working overnight to fix it.
Winner: HSR Search and Rescue Team, Switzerland (air)

Piloting Award, handed by Stjepan Bogdan from University of Zagreb-FER , for outstanding UAV piloting skills. The team was able to recover the aerial robot after an unintentional landing without incurring manual intervention.
Winner: Raptors, Poland (land & air)

Autonomy Award, handed by Frank Schneider from Fraunhofer FKIE, for the best autonomy of land robots. Outstanding autonomous navigation and automatic object detection.
Winner: IMM, Poland (land)

SAUC-E Student Award – handed by Bill Kirkwood (IEEE OES), Kelly Cooper (ONR) and Hitesh Patel (AUVSI) to the best student marine team.
Winner: AUV Team Tomkyle, Germany (sea)

Teams were given a diploma and set of eZ430-Chronos development tool sponsored by Texas Instruments.

Watch the ERL Emergency 2017 Awards Ceremony video

More info

The European Robotics League is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n° 688441.

The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition was organised locally by the NATO STO-Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) of La Spezia, Italy.

Designing and representing control algorithms is challenging in swarm robotics, where the collective swarm performance depends on interactions between robots and with their environment. The currently available modeling languages, such as UML, cannot fully express these interactions. The Behaviour-Data Relations Modeling Language (BDRML) explicitly represents robot behaviours and data that robots utilise, as well as relationships between them. This allows BDRML to express control algorithms where robots cooperate and share information with each other while interacting with the environment. Here’s the work I presented this week at #IROS2017.

BDRML primitives

Primitives are the basic blocks of BDRML. They include:

• Behaviour: A set of processes that deal with a particular situation a robot finds itself in, for example “Scout”
• Internal data structure: Information that is stored in a robot’s memory
• External data structure: Information that is stored in a non-robot entity, i.e., in the robot’s environment

BDRML relations

The following relations between entities can exist:

• Transition: The robot transitions from one behavioural mode to another
• Read \ Write: Internal data is used \ stored by the robot engaged in particular behaviour
• Receive \ Send: External data is used \ stored by the robot. In the case of the Send relation, a robot may also send the data to another robot that stores it in its own internal data structure
• Copy: Information is copied from one data structure to another
• Update: The value of a data structure is updated from that in the previous time step by a subroutine not visualised in the BDRML diagram (for example, a pheromone level may spontaneously decrease over time).

The write and send relations can optionally define the new data structure value or a function that updates the value, indicated by a dashed line extending from the end of the relation arrow in a visual description, and written before a colon proceeding the data structure name in a textual description. The \textit{update} relation always must specify the new value or the value update function.

BRML relation conditions

Each relation or operation occurs under a specific set of conditions. A condition is visually represented as an annotated triangle at the beginning of a relation or operation arrow. In a textual representation, a condition set follows a relation signature and is separated from it by a colon. Unless otherwise specified, the “or” logical operator is used when multiple conditions affect a single relation.

Example

A full BDRML representation consists of both visual and textual specification. A set of behaviours, B, internal data structures, Dⁱ and external data structures, D^e, are first defined, followed by a list of relations between them. Each box, circle and arrow in the visual representation must have a corresponding element or line in the textual representation and vice versa.

An example is shown in the picture. The described algorithm allows robots to search for worksites and recruit each other to perform work and it can be applied for decentralised task allocation. A robot performs the “Scout” behaviour by searching the environment for worksites that can be found with a probability p(F). A successful Scout, that finds a worksite, performs the “Work” behaviour, during which it reads from and writes into its internal data structure, “Worksite location”, to keep track of where the worksite is located. Additionally, a working robot sends Worksite location to any Scout that it encounters in order to recruit it.

Note how the condition that allows a robot to transition from the Scout to the Work behaviour can be triggered by both p(F) or by recruitment, i.e., by existence of the internal data structure in the Scout’s memory. Also note that the condition of recruitment, “scout encountered” signifies that the two robots have to be at a similar place at a similar time for recruitment to occur. The BDRML diagram fully and unambiguously describes when recruitment is performed, what information is exchanged between robots and how it affects robot behaviour.

Publication:
Pitonakova, L., Crowder, R. & Bullock, S. (in press). Behaviour-Data Relations Modelling Language For Multi-Robot Control Algorithms. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017), IEEE.

From butterflies that sprout wings to hermit crabs that switch their shells, many animals must adapt their exterior features in order to survive. While humans don’t undergo that kind of metamorphosis, we often try to create functional objects that are similarly adaptive — including our robots.

Despite what you might have seen in “Transformers” movies, though, today’s robots are still pretty inflexible. Each of their parts usually has a fixed structure and a single defined purpose, making it difficult for them to perform a wide variety of actions.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are aiming to change that with a new shape-shifting robot that’s something of a superhero: It can transform itself with different “outfits” that allow it to perform different tasks.

Dubbed “Primer,” the cube-shaped robot can be controlled via magnets to make it walk, roll, sail, and glide. It carries out these actions by wearing different exoskeletons, which start out as sheets of plastic that fold into specific shapes when heated. After Primer finishes its task, it can shed its “skin” by immersing itself in water, which dissolves the exoskeleton.

“If we want robots to help us do things, it’s not very efficient to have a different one for each task,” says Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and principal investigator on the project. “With this metamorphosis-inspired approach, we can extend the capabilities of a single robot by giving it different ‘accessories’ to use in different situations.”

Primer’s various forms have a range of advantages. For example, “Wheel-bot” has wheels that allow it to move twice as fast as “Walk-bot.” “Boat-bot” can float on water and carry nearly twice its weight. “Glider-bot” can soar across longer distances, which could be useful for deploying robots or switching environments.

Primer can even wear multiple outfits at once, like a Russian nesting doll. It can add one exoskeleton to become “Walk-bot,” and then interface with another, larger exoskeleton that allows it to carry objects and move two body lengths per second. To deploy the second exoskeleton, “Walk-bot” steps onto the sheet, which then blankets the bot with its four self-folding arms.

“Imagine future applications for space exploration, where you could send a single robot with a stack of exoskeletons to Mars,” says postdoc Shuguang Li, one of the co-authors of the study. “The robot could then perform different tasks by wearing different ‘outfits.’”

The project was led by Rus and Shuhei Miyashita, a former CSAIL postdoc who is now director of the Microrobotics Group at the University of York. Their co-authors include Li and graduate student Steven Guitron. An article about the work appears in the journal Science Robotics on Sept. 27.

Robot metamorphosis

Primer builds on several previous projects from Rus’ team, including magnetic blocks that can assemble themselves into different shapes and centimeter-long microrobots that can be precisely customized from sheets of plastic.

While robots that can change their form or function have been developed at larger sizes, it’s generally been difficult to build such structures at much smaller scales.

“This work represents an advance over the authors’ previous work in that they have now demonstrated a scheme that allows for the creation of five different functionalities,” says Eric Diller, a microrobotics expert and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the paper. “Previous work at most shifted between only two functionalities, such as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ shapes.”

The team outlines many potential applications for robots that can perform multiple actions with just a quick costume change. For example, say some equipment needs to be moved across a stream. A single robot with multiple exoskeletons could potentially sail across the stream and then carry objects on the other side.

“Our approach shows that origami-inspired manufacturing allows us to have robotic components that are versatile, accessible, and reusable,” says Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Designed in a matter of hours, the exoskeletons fold into shape after being heated for just a few seconds, suggesting a new approach to rapid fabrication of robots.

“I could envision devices like these being used in ‘microfactories’ where prefabricated parts and tools would enable a single microrobot to do many complex tasks on demand,” Diller says.

As a next step, the team plans to explore giving the robots an even wider range of capabilities, from driving through water and burrowing in sand to camouflaging their color. Guitron pictures a future robotics community that shares open-source designs for parts much the way 3-D-printing enthusiasts trade ideas on sites such as Thingiverse.

“I can imagine one day being able to customize robots with different arms and appendages,” says Rus. “Why update a whole robot when you can just update one part of it?”

This project was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.